From 1954 to 1985, Inge Lammel was the director of the Arbeiterliedarchiev (Labour and Working-Class Songs) at the Academy of the Arts in Berlin. Throughout its life, the Archive remained a small institution with few resources, but in the course of the thirty-five years leading up to 1990, it had collected considerable volumes of printed and unprinted material, scores, songbooks, memoirs, (long before “oral history” had been recognised as a special type of material), gramophone records, tapes, etc.—an effort led by Inge Lammel from the time when the Archive was first established. In 1990, the Archive was more or less closed down, despite the fact that at the time it was the centre of vigorous research activities, not just in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), but also in the Federal Republic of Germany. This component of research into labor and working-class evolution has now largely been discontinued; one of the aims behind this publication is to provide any emerging renewed interest with a point of departure.